By Todd Duncan

The Law of Leverage
You’re Less Likely to Fail When You’ve Told Others You Will Succeed

In sales, sharing your goals and dreams with the right people can be the difference between average and above-average success. That’s because accountability produces the leverage necessary to follow through with your aspirations. The right kind of leverage is much more than motivation or hope; it is the essential link between what you desire and what you do, between your dreams and your destiny. Without leverage, you’ll never reach the peak of your potential.

You Can’t Climb Alone

Leverage ensues when you share your goals with the right people. That’s important for you to understand. The people with whom you share your aspirations must be the dream stokers in your life, not the dream soakers. They must be dream makers, not dream breakers. They must be people who have hearts for seeing you succeed and hands for helping you do so. They can be sales managers or spouses, friends or coworkers, mentors or professional coaches. But what’s most important is not what roles they normally play. What’s most important is that you have confidence that they care about who you are and who you desire to become. You see, leverage is a result of shar­ing your dreams with people whom you know will help you reach the top. Think of it this way: Following the Law of Leverage is like throw­ing a rope up the mountain of your career and knowing that people are there who will secure the rope and help pull you up the mountain.

To be successful and satisfied in your sales career, you must surround yourself with people who will push, pull, drag, and drive you to greater heights. The beauty of leverage is that once it’s created, it permeates more than your sales career. Leverage adds tremendous value to your life and to the lives of your clients.

Leveraging Your Life

To best leverage your sales career you must employ it in three areas. Let’s look at them.

PERSONAL LEVERAGE

Enlisting personal leverage begins when you commit your plans to paper. In other words, recording your goals and dreams is your first act of commitment in following through on them. The last chapter taught you how to do this most effectively. But simply writ­ing your vision, goals, and plans down is not enough to effectively create leverage. You must also commit to review what you’ve written on a regular basis. Only then are you providing accountability to yourself. In essence, you are regularly reminding yourself of your commitments.

ASSOCIATE LEVERAGE

It’s one thing to go out and ask a few friends to occasionally inquire if you’re doing what you said you would. It’s another to enlist people who will help you do so. Creating associate leverage is not about establishing an environment in which you’re comfortable. All that does is affirm your current level of success, or lack of success. True associate leverage helps you act beyond your comfort zone so that you continually climb higher, as does the trust of your clients. That’s why it’s vital that your partners be people who aren’t afraid to ask you the hard questions, the questions that stretch your mental capacity to its peak, the questions that elicit actions that challenge you to do more than you are currently doing.

PROFESSIONAL LEVERAGE

Professional leverage results when you employ the services of a professional coach or mentor. It is in this type of accountability relationship that your selling skills are best honed and your plans find the most productive path.  If you want to climb, and continue climbing, to higher levels of selling success and fulfillment, you must have professional leverage in your career. Take ini­tiative to invest (your own money if you have to) in a professional coach or mentor whose goal is to help you bridge the gap between your dreams and destiny.

Leverage Begins With You

If you want to be a better salesperson tomorrow than you are today, you must stop talking about it and start doing something. That starts by following this Law. It’s about ceasing to sell alone by reaching out to others who will help you succeed on a level far greater than you can by yourself. It’s about becoming more vulnerable in accountability relationships so that you can be more valuable in client relationships. It’s about multiplying your partners so that you can multiply your propensity for success. It’s about leveraging your best sales career so that you can live your best life. That’s how the Law of Leverage can work for you. And it begins when you do.

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